Cubicle Life

Posted by June Yong under Museums/Heritage Galleries
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Modern day workers are mostly well acquainted to cubicle life. Already we complain when we spend our 9-5 in square boxes. What if, just what if, we had to eat, sleep, change in our cubicles? Let’s adjust to cubicle life in 1930s Chinatown.

Chinatown in the 1930s. What would you see? Medicine men weighing their wares; smoke rising from the opium dens; gamblers gambling; samsui women ferrying; hawkers selling - altogether forming a marketplace that never sleeps.

If each were to play a note, it would have resulted in a deafening cacophony. Yet by no small miracle, they co-existed in the narrow 5-foot laneways that line the streets of Chinatown. Kudos to the Chinatown Heritage Centre for recreating the exact atmosphere and conditions of life in a shophouse. Yes, the crampness, the dirty walls, the tiny cubicles (that packed up to a family of ten) , those rickety wooden beds, and various other tools and items that one might expect to find in grandpa’s suitcase. All of these were created from the actual things that made up life in Chinatown, kindly donated by the residents themselves.

The second floor of the shophouse is divided into numerous rooms, housing tenants of all trades. In the cubicle (featured at the top), can you guess how many people were squashed in there? I almost fell over when the guide told me that a family of ten made the cubicle their home.

Of course, there were spill-overs who had to make their beds in the narrow corridor. These poor souls would be forced to sleep the latest and to wake the earliest, lest they get trampled on.

For so many people living under this roof, cooking in this kitchen would have been a competitive sport. But then again, survival of the fittest would already have been a mantra of the people who lived, breathed, and gave Chinatown it’s name.

Things to do:

1. Look for your surname of the ‘Wall of surnames’ and check out the origins of your forefathers, as well as stories of famous personalities who lived in Chinatown.

2. Solve the mystery of the ‘hole in the floor’ of the room which once housed Mdm See Cheng’s physician father. Mdm See Cheng has just published her book on her life growing up in Chinatown. You can check it out at the museum shop.

3. Sit on an old wooden chair and view the video testimonies of a Samsui woman, a hawker (who’s still cooking so you can find his stall in the Chinatown market), and even the son and grandson of Eu Tong Sen!

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